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Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

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Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#451

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

igor47 wrote: post #419
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't paraphrase, I put the exact quote[1] I had copied earlier from goodreads in google and got garbage. I use only local LLM's, So if anyone has Open AI's search tools give it a shot. [1] "Few hundred years of Western society that we have lost the ability to memorise vast amounts of information." ― Lynne Kelly, Memory Craft: Improve your memory using the most powerful methods from around the world

Open AI fails here: https://chatgpt.com/share/6770c547-2f90-8004-ba41-21bfa4d3a7... Curious about your local LLM usage -- do you have that documented, or can you recommend sources on how to get started in that domain? I self host most of my infrastructure, but not LLMs so far. Do you need special hardware? How do you interact with the LLMs? How to you keep them updated? Do you fine tune/do any training, or just of th…

Update:

I have documented how I run local LLMs here - https://abishekmuthian.com/how-i-run-llms-locally/ .

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#452

Post by vkazanov »

jazzypants wrote: post #442
glenstein wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a conversation almost exactly like this too, about an obscure dos based 3d fighting game. And some pessimistic instinct tells me I should worry, like this capability will be optimized away in future versions. It's like that precise pang of satisfaction is tied to a jaded feeling that I can't trust it to last if it ultimately depends on infrastructure and incentives that will lead openai toward eating the wor…

Let me guess: One Must Fall 2097 or FX Fighter?

One must fall was AMAZING! It had so much character and satisfying feedback in it!

(Or this is how I remember it)

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#453

Post by carlosjobim »

nicbou wrote: post #446
carlosjobim wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you noticed a decline in sales from AIs? I'd think that for such a service, people who don't want to pay wouldn't pay you anyway even if they went to your website first for the information, and people who do want to pay will find your business through the AI.

I don’t sell my services. My income comes from affiliate links on some pages (e.g. for choosing a first bank). A vast majority of the content is not monetised. I noticed a drop in traffic, despite having added a lot of valuable guides this year. The traffic per page is way down, and only for Google. You are correct that people don’t pay for this, even when they email me and I personally assist them. There’s just an e…

People pay thousands of dollars for immigration assistance, even if you're just filling out paperwork. If you want to make money from your webpage, you could simply offer to help them with these things for a fee. And leave the information up if you want, for the people who don't want to pay. Also, the more information you have up, the more comfortable people will be to hire you. E-mails from people who want free advice simply gets the delete button. They can read your free information or hire you.

As for affiliate links, I think they are a thing of the past. It's exactly these that web users want to avoid. Better to make a deal where you charge the bank a fee for each person you sign up. There's a lot of banks who offer these referral deals to all their customers. For example N26 gives you €70 per referral and Wise gives £25 per referral.

You can probably make good money from your website from doing what you love. But ads and affiliate links and getting money from traffic is a thing of the past.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#454

Post by Ekaros »

discordance wrote: post #415
jerf wrote: post #211

Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked. It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with inf…

It's taken 20 years of a public company having to show quarter on quarter, year on year revenue increases, which has resulted in (Dark) Google squeezing dollars over quality. I think AI companies have a bit more time to avoid a similar situation.

Or not. If the rates stay where there are or do not drop drastically there is lot sooner pressure to actually show profits. 2010s were very special economic environment.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#455

Post by Ekaros »

wwweston wrote: post #18
m_ke wrote: post #8

SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm. Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for keywords related to their business.

Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant again. As are journalistic institutions.

I wouldn't even be sure about libraries... Books or whatever you are storing have to come from somewhere. And you have to regularly enough get new items in. And if these are polluted by AI generated content in various ways... Being able to pick real things from fake is nearly impossible outside very specialised areas where you have gone to primary sources. And even then just look at science. Already buckling with various issues.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#456

Post by marcus0x62 »

d0mine wrote: post #443
marcus0x62 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I was making an analogy. 2) I took at look at the most recent CMS data[0] I could find (from 2022,) and out of the top ten owners of hospitals in the United States, zero are payers. I only recognize about half of the parties in the 11-20 part of the list, but of the ones I do recognize, one is related to a payer. I can find no data to support your assertion that insurance companies are purchasing hospitals. They a…

Hospitals vs. physicians groups is a distinction without a difference in this context (people responsible for making you better). It is like on paper J&J is not responsible for cancer its baby powder causes (some bankrupt entity left holding the bag). To make sure I'm not misremembering, I've asked deepseek in web search mode: "Is it true that hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies in US" It says: "I…

I don't see much point in continuing this conversation. I linked you to primary source data about who owns hospitals in the United States. You responded with some AI slop with absolutely no reliable citations.

I posted an analogy about the dynamic that exists between hospitals and doctors. You responded by saying that's a distinction without a difference, when the dynamic I described is a primary difference between the two groups: doctors can practice medicine without hospitals. Hospitals cannot provide patient care without doctors.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#457

Post by adxl »

In 1999 I worked at Yahoo! It was great the stock was flying, I worked on really cool tech writing C++ code. Then one day I went to a social dinner and a high schooler got up and made a speech and at one point said “I googled it”. Right then and there I know the gig was up.

So far I have not heard anyone say I GPT’d it, but Google is running very dangerously close to the edge here. For one thing the founders have checked out, never a good sign.

Something that also bugs people is GOOG wants to follow you everywhere, when you sign in to many websites that little blurb asking for your google account comes from a google server (https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client" async defer>).

I was responsible for servers that ran 100m page views a day at Yahoo! One day I was approached by this smarmy little guy who asked if he could pull logs from the machines. Alarm bells. Who the heck was this and what was he doing with the logs. I knew of course he worked for Filo and so I had to give over the data. This was the start of the spying on the customers. Google is a master of this, and it really irks a lot of their customers. Another red flag.

Alternates like duck duck go and brave have made some inroads. Their percentages are quite low still.

There have been layoffs in the name of cost cutting. Googlers have had some very public employee dissatisfaction meetings (my name for them). Employee compensation problems, problems with businesses the company is etc.

One last thing, Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion April 1, 1999 (seriously!). “ Apollo Global Management acquired a 90% stake in Verizon Media, which included Yahoo and AOL, for $5 billion. Verizon retained a 10% stake in the new company, which was rebranded as Yahoo upon the deal's completion.” The deal was finalized Sept 1, 2021 according to chatGPT.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#458

Post by Arnt »

jgalt212 wrote: post #148
Arnt wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that 2000d Google codebase would do a decent job against today's SEO?

I think the search and ad code base may not be explicitly co-mingled, but they are implicitly co-mingled. And return worse search results than the early 2000s code base.

Both are explicitly related to the web at large. Google sells ads on more than two million sites, and those mostly aim to be the kind of sites that feature in search results. I'd say that the two code bases are related, by virtue of operating on the same data structure.

You remember the pagerank paper? It described how Google classifies each page on a scale from "something that links to good pages" to "informative page". Google and other search engines produces links to the latter. And since then, web site operators have had strong incentives to be on the "informative page" end of the range. Today I don't think the 2000s code can find a lot of pages of the former kind (well, outside Facebook).

It produced very nice results back then. It was/is good code, but good results need more than just good code, it needs good input too.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#459

Post by johny115 »

adxl wrote: post #457

In 1999 I worked at Yahoo! It was great the stock was flying, I worked on really cool tech writing C++ code. Then one day I went to a social dinner and a high schooler got up and made a speech and at one point said “I googled it”. Right then and there I know the gig was up. So far I have not heard anyone say I GPT’d it, but Google is running very dangerously close to the edge here. For one thing the founders have che…

I say ChatGPTed it almost every day, or some form of it, OpenAI dropped ball on the name. Me and me friends say "asked CHatGPT, asked GPT, asked AI (but mean ChatGPT)" ... it hurts though as it's all too long and akward, no intuitive verb to use.

Probably just my limited perspective, but I am also noticing, it's vastly men who use ChatGPT daily on anything from random questions, to health queries or personal growth. Not sure why, but somehow, I don't know a single female who would use it much, beyond super basic queries. Meanwhile guys of all kinds of backgrounds, nerds or not, technical or not, young or old, doesn't matter ... if there is a heavy user, it's a guy. But as I say, just limited perspective, I don't know big enough number of people for substantial sample size. Just recently I see the stark contrasts more and more, even very smart, nerdy and highly curious women I know, are not interested in ChatGPT.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#460

Post by BeefWellington »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #410
potsandpans wrote: post #42

Just sharing an anecdote: I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a somewhat obscure source. Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events. o…

I didn't paraphrase, I put the exact quote[1] I had copied earlier from goodreads in google and got garbage. I use only local LLM's, So if anyone has Open AI's search tools give it a shot. [1] "Few hundred years of Western society that we have lost the ability to memorise vast amounts of information." ― Lynne Kelly, Memory Craft: Improve your memory using the most powerful methods from around the world

Interestingly:

- Bing: Goodreads is third result

- DDG: Paywalled NZ Herald article appears to be the only result.

Of course what you've really uncovered is that Google search is the only thing that respects robots.txt: https://www.goodreads.com/robots.txt

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